Slouching Toward a Republican Utopia: Overturning Roe v. Wade Is Only the Beginning

By Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew

We all knew it was coming, but it still hit like a lightning bolt.  When Politico released a draft of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last week the reaction was fast and furious, with the majority of Americans voicing outrage at the pending loss of women’s reproductive rights while anti-abortion activists celebrated and Republicans tried to shift attention away from Alito’s attack on Roe to the “scandal” that the draft text was leaked.  

For anyone who has been paying attention, Senators Collins’s and Murkowski’s shock that the reactionary justices they voted to confirm acted as they did was tough to take seriously.  Were the Senators really that stupid or was their public dismay simply a cynical exercise in ass-covering?  

Whatever the answer, the more important fact we are left to ponder is that the rollback of the twentieth century has begun in earnest.  This is not a rhetorical flourish or a performative volley in the culture wars.  Republicans want to take away the rights of millions of Americans and undermine participatory democracy for real.  

As many have already observed, the assault on reproductive rights that this draft decision by the Supreme Court signals is a broader assault on women’s control of their bodies, gay marriage, trans people, and basic privacy protections—indeed, it’s an attack on human rights writ large.  

As the Right has successfully diverted the attention of much of the media and conservative corners of the Democratic party with bogus hysteria about “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” they have been systemically fulfilling their authoritarian agenda in state houses across the country. Indeed, just last week after the Roe leak, Louisiana Republicans advanced a state bill to “make abortion a crime of murder”

Before the news about overturning Roe hit, Republicans had already been busy fighting (and in some cases succeeding) to ban books, censor school curriculum, discipline teachers, and marginalize and humiliate gay and trans people.  While too many who should have known better were lazily parroting bullshit conservative talking points about the excesses of the “woke left,” the right has been rolling back the clock on a wide range of issues. 

The goal is clear: the imposition of a white, Christian, heteronormative hegemony that largely appeals to a shrinking minority of the population. Their invoking “originalism” must be seen for what it is--a desire to time travel to a golden era of the past before the great movements for a more inclusionary democracy expanded the definition of citizenship and liberty in our country.  

Taking away the essential bodily rights of American women in the name of returning us to this past erases the notion that women own their personhood.  Thus, the never-ending culture war is deeply tied to the assault on democracy because The Handmaid’s Tale future the Right is imposing on us is only viable if we live under what is effectively minority rule.  

Alito and company want an America free from the tyranny of the majority that our founders, who never really envisioned a fully inclusionary democracy, feared.   

In the Supreme Court majority’s view, the right to abortion should be overturned because it is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”  If this is the case, there is a wide array of other rights we may have thought were safe that are now an open question.  

As the events of last week revealed, there is no line they will not cross in the service of returning our country to the conservative utopia of the mythological past.